64-bit Mint 17.3 Xfce LiveUSB
.
This has become my favorite LiveUSB. It is reminiscent of Knoppix LiveUSBs in a 7.2-and-
earlier period when Knoppix LiveCDs were still fashionable, or available as the case
may be. Especially reminiscent of squashfs adaptations of Knoppix by some forum members
in that era.
I used Windows 7 to download this 1.5 GB LiveUSB iso, store it on Windows NTFS and used UUI,
Universal USB Installer, to make a LiveUSB directly from the iso. I used a 16 Gb Cruzer
Ultra-Fit to maximize the USB 2.0 capability of my Dell Inspiron. Total usage with 1.5 Gb
of read-only squashfs Mint and 2.0 Gb of read-write persistence was only 3.5 Gb.
Mint 17.3 apps include Firefox 43, LibreOffice 5.0.3.2, Gedit 2.30.4, Geany 1.23.1. Kernel
is 64-bit dual-cpu-capable version 3.19.0-32. I prefer the whisker menu of Xfce to a
comparable menu used by Mint Cimarron. I used b43 drivers rather than wl for my
Broadcom wifi to pick up some performance. I learned from Mint Network forum to disable IPV6
to overcome DNS time-outs that had been plaguing all my current Linux configurations.
Presently resuming experiments using Dav Stott's mergeusb to convert Mint 17.3 Xfce read-write
persistence changes into virtually read-only squashfs amendments. mergeusb has had one recent
update which seeks to make sure Mint's persistence file represents a valid filesystem before
actual doing a merge. Recent changes to mergeusb adds only two lines of code.
Previously, Mint 17.2 worked ok for me with the initial version of mergeusb. Recently,
I couldn't get Mint 17.3 Cimarron to work with either new or old versions of mergeusb,
specifically due to failure of filesystems to pass fsck tests. I'm hopeful 17.3 Xfce works
as well with mergeusb as 17.2 Xfce did.
